The Parish Clerk (1907) eBook

[Footnote 29: If that is the correct translation
of profestis diebus disciplinis scolasticis indulgentes.
Dr. Legg thinks that it may refer to their own education.]

It is certain—­for the churchwarden accounts
bear witness to the fact—­that in several
parishes the clerks performed this duty of teaching.
Thus in the accounts of the church of St. Giles, Reading,
occurs the following:

Pay’d to Whitborne
the clerk towards his wages and he to be
bound to teach ij children
for the choir ... xij s.

At Faversham, in 1506, it was ordered that “the
clerks or one of them, as much as in them is, shall
endeavour themselves to teach children to read and
sing in the choir, and to do service in the church
as of old time hath been accustomed, they taking for
their teaching as belongeth thereto”; and at
the church of St. Nicholas, Bristol, in 1481, this
duty of teaching is implied in the order that the
clerk ought not to take any book out of the choir
for children to learn in without licence of the procurators.
We may conclude, therefore, that the task of teaching
the children of the parish not unusually devolved
upon the clerk, and that some knowledge of Latin formed
part of the instruction given, which would be essential
for those who took part in the services of the church.

Nor were his labours yet finished. In John Myrc’s
Instructions to Parish Priests, a poem written
not later than 1450, a treatise containing good sound
morality, and a good sight of the ecclesiastical customs
of the Middle Ages, we find the following lines:

It was customary, therefore, for the clerk to accompany
the priest to the house of the sick person, when the
clergyman went to administer the Last Sacrament or
to visit the suffering. The clerk was required
to carry a lighted candle and ring a bell, and an
ancient MS. of the fourteenth century represents him
marching before the priest bearing his light and his
bell. In some town parishes he was ordered always
to be at hand ready to accompany the priest on his
errands of mercy. It was a grievous offence for
a clerk to be absent from this duty. In the parish
of St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, the clerks
were not allowed “to go or ride out of the town
without special licence had of the vicar and churchwardens,